The Next Country by Idra Novey
"Big-hearted, individualistic in scope and voice, Idra Novey's The Next Country surveys a terrain that’s truly multifaceted and calibrated down to every word, every nuance. Each poem’s imagistic certainty enlarges meaning. Line by line, a playful innuendo moves us, and we find ourselves in that rugged country of the human spirit where enlightenment and surprise are twin rulers." |
|
Shelter by Carey Salerno Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker's unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion and personal responsibility. Heartrending, but absolutely necessary and enlightening, this lyric debut is beautiful in its courage and honesty. "In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own." |
|
Rough Cradle by Betsy Sholl Sholl's masterful, musical seventh collection focuses on human dichotomies: body and soul, mystery and knowledge, grief and ecstasy. Though the self is small in relation to death, love is enormous, and no life too small or mean to matter. Rough Cradle entreats us to love everything before we lose everything. "Betsy Sholl's Rough Cradle is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision." |
|
Slamming Open the Door by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno Bonanno's heartrending autobiographical collection inspires both compassion for and awe of the human spirit. Of all the losses we may be asked to bear, the murder of one’s child must be the most terrible. These poems evoke that keenly, seeking justice but transcending judgment as they grieve loss, celebrate love, and find healing "Slamming Open the Door is a gift to us—a gift of power, truth, rage, and beauty. It lets us stand close beside its speaker, where we long to be. What we have feared to know, and need to know, Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's poems let us know. Her book is true to devastation and it’s true to love—it meets a kind of end of the world with an action of fresh making, which teaches and holds us." |
|
Winter Tenor by Kevin Goodan In Goodan’s second collection, nature is equally cruel to all, and yearning is subsumed by an acceptance as terrible as it is beautiful. These poems are ecstatic, musical prayers, finding God in the details as well as the void. Winter Tenor is a tightly wrought lyric exploration of the severities of farm life, where doom and grace are one. "We readers are lucky when we encounter a voice that speaks as if it were speaking to each of us alone, an impossible and therefore necessary illusion, a miracle of multiple visions, essential in a commonplace way only what's divine can determine—this describes Winter Tenor's quintessential and most valuable presence. I love reading this book."" |
|
